Automatic call distributors (ACDs) are specialized phone systems designed to route incoming calls to available personnel, referred to as “agents,” so that calls are properly and evenly distributed. Increasingly, companies are using ACDs to make outgoing calls. ACDs generally perform one or more of the following functions: (i) recognize and answer incoming calls; (ii) review database(s) for instructions on what to do with a particular call; (iii) using these instructions, identify an appropriate agent and queue the call, often times providing a prerecorded message; and (iv) route the call to an agent as soon as the agent is available.
The term automatic call distributor comes from distributing the incoming calls in a logical pattern to a group of agents. That pattern may be uniform (to distribute the work uniformly), or it may be top-down (the same agents in the same order get the calls and are kept busy, the ones on the top typically being kept busier than the ones on the bottom), or it may be specialty routing, where calls are routed to agents who are most likely able to help the caller the most.
Skill-based routing (AKA resume routing) is an ACD feature that provides for the selection of an appropriate agent for handling a particular call. With this feature, agents are registered with their skills set as resources for handling calls. Examples for different skill sets are languages (English, French, Spanish, etc.) or business types (electronics, appliances, hardware, lumber, etc.). The caller indicates the skill that she requires for a particular transaction, and the system either finds the appropriate resource or queues the caller until the resource with the requested skill becomes available.
Call center agents may also have access to particular resources that are physically located within one or more call center facilities. Such resources may be used by the call center agents to respond to requests from a caller. For example, an agent providing a customer with information about availability of particular products may find it useful to be located in a department of a store containing that particular product. Various call center agents may be in proximity to different resources at different times. This may place limits on the ability of call center agents to respond to requests.